“Nowhere It Was”

The time-erasing qualities of Jessica Pratt and the late Trish Keenan on the occasion of two new releases

There’s something Lethean in the songs of California-based singer/ songwriter Jessica Pratt, where as you listen you begin to forget about time and the past. Her fourth album Here in the Pitch is out this week. It’s somehow been five years since 2019’s Quiet Signs, which seems unbelievable, but also just about right, as time has a way of loosing its strictures within her own music. Or as Troye Sivan put it: “Her voice is kind of timeless—I feel like it could have existed forever.”

This new music could have been written in the months after Quiet Signs or decades before that. Her hushed, near-murmured songs don’t draw undue attention to themselves. But lean closer and an uncanny aural space opens. There’s an ineffable, haunting quality in Pratt that makes me muse on the illusions of memory while I get lost within her hushed music. As I started listening to Pitch, that trick of memory unfolded again. Pratt’s music only seems like it follows a traditional verse-chorus-verse structure, when it actually traces the contours of thought and how it transforms and distorts across the duration of a pop song length.

I forgot that I spoke to Pratt spoke back in 2015 when she talked to me about the “intuitive psychic zone and not let[ting] things get contaminated” intention in her writing. I also then remembered we spoke again in 2019, where I wrote that her songs “might be a melody you’ve just imagined rather than heard.” Pratt’s music can bring to mind Marianne Faithfull, Judy Collins, Vashti Bunyan, one of Phil Spector’s many female singers, or any chanteuse from a bygone era. On the surface, you can say that she makes music that sounds like the 1960s in the 21st century, but she also makes you forget such distinctions. “Some people chip away time more than they understand,” she sings at one point here.

She does understand and I think that Pratt evokes these singers so as to play with the properties of the past and the nostalgia we affix to such sounds. Pitch can bring up thoughts of Laurel Canyon, yé-yé, or forlorn bossa nova, which the accompaniment accentuates. The heavy reverb drums that open the album conjure that Spector Wall of Sound, an electric bass motif brings to mind the mighty Carol Kaye and the Wrecking Crew.

Or at least, that was my first thought, but when I listen back, it’s just the briefest of figures that kindles such a connection. Historically, such arrangements led to a payoff at the chorus, of building towards a big peak, the pop song money shot. But on Pitch, Pratt cagily deploys these arrangements not to lift to some new height so much as to serve as a sleight of hand, a distraction that allows her to deftly slip whatever you were holding onto further into the shadows and just out of grasp.

I had never thought of Pratt’s craft as being in alignment with that of the late Trish Keenan, but this week also sees a new archival release from Broadcast. Entitled Spell Blanket - Collected Demos 2006 - 2009, it’s the first of two upcoming archival collections that will be, per the press sheet, “a closing of the door on Broadcast and will be the last release from the band.”

Photo by James Cargill

Put together on the same playlist, Spell Blanket and Here in the Pitch revealed much common ground between the two artists…